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Anti Spam Systems are Annoying
Recently I've had a number of customers contact me for support and when my automated system sent them confirmation, I received back a message that said I had to click a link (a challenge/response system). I have a strong objection to these systems (such as the one from SpamArrest) as they put the burden on me even though I didn't initiate the contact. After clicking the click, these systems now require me to enter a code seen in a graphic which wastes more of my time. In addition, these systems block legitimate email, such as when ordering stuff, signing up for newsletters, etc. Most people won't remember to white list every site they want to receive email from, so they'll miss email and get mad when they don't receive it. I tried a challenge/response system using procmail back in 1996 or 1997 and found that while it did reduce spam, it also almost caused me to lose important email from someone. Personally I've found that dspam is a quite effective, non-intrusive, system. When it catches spam, it quarantines it and then I look through the quarantine periodically.
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I don't play well with others
For years I've known that I sometimes don't work well with others; this wouldn't be much of a probably if it was every now and again, but for me it is something I have to work on all the time. I was thinking about this the other day and figured out when this started happening. It was my senior year in college when I had an internship and had to work with a QA person. This QA person had no clue about consumer software and if it didn't work right for him, it wouldn't pass. The problem with this is that he was testing from a lab where he had to dial a 9 to get an outside line where our product was targeted at the home user that just had to dial a number (the product setup a dial up networking account). So we kept having to write code to get QA to pass it. This annoyed me to no end because this person just didn't seem competent to me and actually hindered the product (he wasn't the only person that hindered it; whoever setup the deal did some poor negotiating). This wasn't my last time having to write code to get QA to get off my back.
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Testing out Camino
For the last few days, I've been playing with Camino as my default web browser. For my new help system, it has some components that rely on Firefox (for editing knowledgebase articles), so I wanted to give Firefox a try. Unfortunately Firefox doesn't look like a Mac application. Camino is supposed to be a Mac-ified version of Firefox, so I decided to give it a try. While it's better than Firefox in terms of being a Mac application, it still has some weird behaviors. It appears to be faster than Safari and seems to be functioning well. I imported my bookmarks and since I'm using 1Passwd for storing passwords to websites, the transition was easy. One bug that is kind of annoying is there are 2 checkboxes for Passwords; "Allow saving in the Keychain" and "Auto fill passwords in web forms". Unfortunately they don't work properly. With 1Password, I fill in my passwords with it so I turned off Auto fill passwords in Safari and now Camino. In Safari, the HTTP Authentication passwords still got filled in, but web forms didn't get filled in. Camino, however, requires that "Auto fill passwords in web forms" be turned on to fill in web forms as well as HTTP Authentication passwords.
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New technical support system
This week, I installed (actually I had someone else install it as he had experience doing it and it only took him 30 minutes) a new technical support system for ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. I decided that I needed a more dynamic way to update my FAQ and better handle technical support inquiries as many of them are the same types of questions. For the last few weeks, one of my clients has been evaluating a new CRM system as it has outgrown its current system. I've been following along to see what would work for me and nothing that was being evaluated met my needs. So, I started looking at its current system, Cerberus, and found that it actually could work for me. They have a free version which I had installed and for now, it seems to meet my needs. If I need more, the $200 fee for small businesses is pretty reasonable in my opinion. So, check out my support site and see how the end user portion works. The backend that I use to respond to support tickets also seems to be working well. There is one bug in the user interface that I've been unable to fix (source is included), but that's minor.